When Will My Life Begin?
by Thorn17
Summary: Pre-A Study In Pink. After being permanently invalided home from the Army, John fails to see what life could possibly have to throw at him any more. He thinks that there is nothing left for him now, and then, as is often the case, Life takes John by surprise and shows him that he couldn't have been more wrong.


John didn't really know what he believed to happen after death. Strange really, considering the number of near-death situations that he'd found himself in. He'd thought he might have some kind of inkling, or idea, about what awaited him when it was all over. Instead, there was nothing. No clues, no hints, nothing. Even so, John liked to think that there was _something_ after all this, something more pleasant to look forward to after the horrors that he had witnessed during it. Even since being invalided out of the Army, he'd done little else but ponder what would have happened to him, had he not been shot. That shot had saved his life, in some ways. He could very well have died out there; it didn't need saying that war zones were hostile territories. In other ways, being shot had destroyed his life completely. It wasn't that John wanted to die, as such, but he figured that life couldn't possibly have anything left to throw at him now. He'd witnessed so many appalling and cruel things on this planet that he'd never thought possible, not even in his wildest nightmares, and he wished every evening to forget about them. But he couldn't do that. Unfortunately, he couldn't forget things on demand.

John was not only tormented by the things he had seen, but by the question of what happened next. What use could he possibly be now to anyone? Here he was, a man with a psychosomatic limp, residing in a scarcely-furnished London flat that was on the sixth floor of a block of others just like it, with a lift which didn't work. Every day he had to struggle up and down the stairs, and the fact that he was no longer able to do something this easy which he had previously taken for granted was detrimental to both his physical and psychological recovery. He also knew that he couldn't even afford to remain in London for long with only his Army pension to live on, but John simply didn't know where else to go. Lodging with Harry was out of the question - his pride would never allow his return after the insults which were traded at their last meeting - and nobody except his estranged family would be able to tolerate him as a flatmate now, would they? What did he have to offer? He was an army doctor that had been permanently excluded from said army, and he was unlikely to find a permanent general practitioner job at the minute, with his current psychosomatic injuries. Some days, he didn't understand why he had survived, when others had not.

As a doctor, John knew that this would probably be diagnosed as 'survivor's guilt', but the knowledge of what it was didn't really make it any less confusing or painful. He'd seen people die before, both friend and foe, men and women alike. Statistically, John had been more likely to die of his injuries than some of those aforementioned people, except he had been in the right place at the right time, whereas they had not. Help could get to him in time; some of the others hadn't been that lucky. Inwardly, John scoffed. 'Lucky'. He didn't feel very lucky now. He was practically alone in the world, jobless, and with deep-rooted issues and injuries that his therapist was failing to banish. He knew that he should be grateful to still be alive - John didn't need anybody to tell him that - and he honestly was, but that didn't stop him feeling like there was something missing, rendering him incomplete. Everything seemed so hard now, seemed so much of a struggle.

In a sense, John felt inferior to his pre-war self. He had been such a happy man, well-liked and respected, with many friends and a relatively supportive family. It was funny how things could change almost in the blink of an eye. As a doctor, John had recognised that this probably wasn't a healthy way to feel and think, and he'd resolved to tell somebody how he felt, but then he'd faced a dilemma. Who could he possibly tell? Who would, quite frankly, give a damn about his problems when they had so many of their own to worry about?

Even if John reluctantly went ahead and followed the advice of Ella, his therapist, and blogged about his life, it wasn't as if said blog even attracted a particularly wide audience. Who would be interested in what he, of all people, had to say? The hit counter would probably only rise thanks to Ella's views, as he knew that she would probably monitor his progress on the blog so that they had something to talk about in their next session. John wasn't forthcoming with his news, information, thoughts and feelings, and simply deflected any effort Ella made to ask about them. It was virtually a game, and not one that he was willing to play.

Sitting alone at his computer desk, staring at the laptop screen whilst painfully aware that his surroundings consisted of a crummy flat, which if truth be told was rather more like a bedsit, John laughed humourlessly to himself at his predicament. Ella had asked him to document everything that happened to him in his blog, and in a way, he'd done exactly that. He'd done nothing, nothing had happened to him, and so in turn, he had written nothing. John was beginning to doubt that anything would ever be written at all.

And then, as if by some sort of magic, one ordinary day became extraordinary, and John's life was transformed into something that seemed to have been taken from a book, a fairytale almost. The listless, broken army doctor came to realise that he'd been wrong about a few major massive assumptions about things. Firstly, he wasn't broken at all; on the contrary, to say that he had been on 'standby mode' would be a more fitting description of his last thirty-odd years of existence.

It was then that John realised that life hadn't run out of things to throw at him; instead, it had only just begun. For it was only then did John begin to understand that the reason that he had no idea about what would happen after his life was over was because his life hadn't even begun yet. It was illogical to expect to experience the second thing when you hadn't even been initiated into the first yet. John had simply pottered around the Earth merely existing for the last thirty-odd years, as an incomplete man waiting for his life to begin, and for someone to complete him. And begin it did, and completed he did become, all thanks to a chance meeting with a misunderstood man named Sherlock Holmes.


End file.
